Prof. Julian Goldsmid

Julian Goldsmid graduated in physics at Queen Mary College, University of London in 1949. He worked as a research scientist at The General Electric Company between 1951 and 1964. In 1954, he and R. W. Douglas published their paper on the use of semiconductors in Peltier refrigeration, highlighting bismuth telluride as a thermoelectric material. He was awarded his Ph.D. at the University of London in 1958 and a D.Sc. at the same university in 1966. Notable features of his research included one of the first demonstrations of bipolar heat conduction and, with Alan Penn, the prediction of enhanced boundary scattering of phonons in semiconductor alloys. In 1964 he was appointed Reader in Solid State Physics at the University of Bath and in 1969 he became Professor of Physics at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Sussex, Southampton and Karlsruhe and at Southern Methodist University. He has held consultancies at several institutions including IBM and A.E.R.E/ Harwell, and, over the past 28 years, at Marlow Industries. After his retirement in 1988 he was made Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales and served for some time as Chairman of the Australian National Standards Commission. He was awarded the Lightfoot Medal of the Institute of Refrigeration in 1959, the Golden Prize of the International Thermoelectric Academy in 2002 and the Outstanding Achievement Award of the International Thermoelectric Society in 2012. He is an Honored Academician of the International Thermoelectric Academy and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.